Sport and Recreation Management Associate Professor Joris Drayer of the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management won the Best Paper award – his second in four years – at the 2013 Sport Marketing Association (SMA) conference, held Oct. 23-26 in Albuquerque, N.M.
Drayer wrote Examining the Role of Fairness in Sport Consumer Ticket Purchases with Assistant Professor Stephen L. Shapiro of Old Dominion University and Assistant Professor Brendan Dwyer of Virginia Commonwealth University. The team also won the Best Paper award from SMA in 2010, selected from 130 submissions worldwide.
“When we won the award a few years ago, it was a total surprise and something that, as a young faculty member, you don’t expect,” Drayer said. “Now, having been a finalist two years ago and winning it again this year, it really validates the quality of the work that we’re doing. It’s such an honor to work with those guys, and it’s a great example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”
The winning paper examines the relationship among various ticket price offers, market, price fluctuations, perceived fairness, and intentions to purchase Major League Baseball tickets.
“It has been argued that consumer perceptions of fairness regarding real-time ticket price fluctuations, such as dynamic ticket pricing (DTP), could influence purchase decisions,” Drayer and his team mentioned in the paper.
Familiarity with DTP and ticket resale in the secondary market was also examined to identify potential moderating effects on perceptions of fairness and purchase intentions.
The research team, through a partnership with the Philadelphia Daily News, had access to a panel of 2,566 Philadelphia-area sports fans. Of those sports fans, 505 participants returned surveys after the study was conducted.
The team found that respondents with different offer price scenarios significantly differ regarding how fair they believe the offer to be, and they differ in their purchase intentions. This ultimately suggests that consumer perceptions of price fairness change based on pricing strategies, and attitudes based on information provided in a transaction could prevent consumers from maximizing utility.
The findings of the paper could be used to help sport organizations understand the impact of ticket price changes.
Drayer has written two book chapters and published more than 30 articles in numerous journals — including Sport Management Review, Sport Marketing Quarterly and the Journal of Sport Management. He co-authored another paper about dynamic ticketing pricing strategies, which has recently been accepted in Sport Management Review.
Drayer is a member of the North American Society for Sport Management and the Sport Marketing Association and has presented at more than 20 national and international sport industry conferences.
—Alexis Wright-Whitley